Republicans currently lead the race for House control, 208 seats to 193 for the Democrats, according to projections reported by ABC News. There are 34 outstanding House seats. The GOP need to win 10 more of those (a total of 218) to win a majority in the chamber.
Republicans currently lead vote counts in 13 seats: 1 remaining Solid Republican seats 3 Likely Republican seats, and 4 Lean Republicans. They lead in 3 Toss-up seats and 2 Lean Democrat seats. If Republicans win all of these seats, they would win 221 seats in the House, one seat fewer than the party won in the 2022 midterms.
However, it’s likely that Republicans do not win all the seats they currently lead in. The race for the House is still firmly up in the air. But it will take some time for us to know the results. That’s because there will likely be a recount in IA-01, where the Republican candidate leads by 0.1 percentage points. And five of the remaining Republican-advantage seats are in California, where will take a few days in most races, and a few weeks in some, to finish counting enough ballots to know whether one candidate has an insurmountable lead.
Then, there’s Alaska’s At-Large district. Per the Alaska secretary of state, the Last Frontier is done reporting any new votes until Nov. 12. Additional ballots will be counted through Nov. 15. The race there is currently way too close to identify a leader. With 71 percent of the vote reporting, the Republican candidate, Nick Begich, currently leads with 49.8% percent of the vote. But that would not be enough to win the seat; Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, so the results you’ll see through Nov. 15 will reflect voters’ first choices only. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, we won’t know the winner until Nov. 20, when the state runs its ranked-choice tabulations.
That means if the race for control of the House is comes down to one or two seats, we may not know who wins until the 20th. And no matter what happens, if the Republicans do win, at this rate, they’ll have a very tenuous majority in which it will be tough to get anything done.
